TheGleanings Blog

This past year we went through the process of becoming Certified Naturally Grown (CNG). CNG standards are largely the same as those of the National Organic Program. Our inspections are conducted by a local farmer. Farmer inspectors are best suited to ask specific questions based on their knowledge of the local pest pressures and farming challenges, and to make helpful suggestions to improve the farm’s sustainability. The CNG model a) ensures that the standards are being upheld and b) strengthens the local farming community by connecting farmers to one another.

CNG means: no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides or GMO seeds; and for livestock producers, no hormones or antibiotics. Our fertilizers are all naturally occurring substances like compost and rock dusts. Annual inspections are done by farmers or customers. CNG is designed for family-sized farms, not agribusiness.

For more information on CNG and/or to review certification documents, you can go to www.naturallygrown.org.

Finally checking in after the 2011 harvest season and the mild winter that isn’t quite over yet but looking forward to Spring 2012. Seeds are ordered—that’s always an exciting time when they arrive in the mail! More good news is that I have hired Kelly McColl to take over this Blog. Once she takes over I am sure there will be regular, entertaining, and informative posts throughout the season!!!

FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN BECOMING MEMBERS OF OUR CSA FOR THE 2012 SEASON, WE ARE SIGNING UP FAMILIES NOW UNTIL MAY. CALL US AT 231-845-6731 AND WE’LL GET A BROCHURE OUT TO YOU!

I have no legitimate excuse for not posting in this blog since January.  Shame on me! 

GARDEN

Since my last entry, we waited out the winter by taking a trip to Phoenix to visit son Will, his wife Katie and the three boys: William, Peter and Henry.  They really should move to Michigan!

When we got back  in early March, we immediately planted seeds in flats. It’s funny how every year we get so-oo excited when those seedlings pop through the dirt.  Our first outside transplant date got postponed because of weeks of rain and cold weather.  Before we knew it, we were transplanting seedlings AND planting seeds continuously for two weeks…everything ended up being 3 to 4 weeks behind.  Some of my first plantings were actually done when I was supposed to be putting in a second planting.  So much for schedules!

Now everything is up.  We have managed to feed our CSA members with the veggies Bill planted back in April in the hoophouse.  This last week I finally finished off the lettuce, carrots and beets.  The spinach ended the week before.  This week we are picking cucumbers and chard from the hoophouse.  I’ve also got cilantro and sunflowers in the hoophouse.  Last year the deer ate half of the sunflowers…who knew they considered those such a delicacy? 

The lettuces and radishes are in the big garden outside.  We have some early heads of broccoli that I hope to pick within the next two weeks.  The peas and beans have buds also.

Basil is outside under a cover to keep hungry beetles off of it and the beets had to be covered also because the deer already found them and had a nice late night snack on them!  Sadly, we had torrential rains for 4 days last week and really cool weather so the tomatoes and peppers and most everything else are slow going.   

This sure doesn’t sound like we’re having much fun with this endeavor.  Granted it is exhausting at times and stressful too, but the rewards outweigh the rains, hail, cold, wind, beetles and deer…well, most of the time.

Tomorrow we have to plant turnips (yes, I know, the deer absolutely LOVE turnips), a second planting of green beans and some fava beans.  I do love my planting wheel though, I don’t have to bend over to plant so it makes the job quite easy and fast!

Are you dreaming about the warm sun and the beach yet??  Well,I hope you all are enjoying these snowy, cold days!  You have to make up your minds to enjoy or else you’ll be miserable, right?  For us it is a great time to curl up with a good book and munch on M&Ms, but only AFTER we have finished our seed orders and garden plans. 

We have attended several valuable workshops this winter that were put on by the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Get Farming program.  We’ve learned about seed saving, soil fertility and composting.  Most of the topics you know about or use on your farm already, but there are always new things to learn…new practices that a local farmer uses with success that you just can’t wait to put into practice yourself!

Last weekend we went to the annual Small Farm Conference in Grayling.  We always learn new things there and meet a few new people from around Michigan.  I attended a workshop on accounting, one on bee keeping and one called Cold Cellars for Four Season Farming.  The cold cellar info will be the most valuable for me so that we can hold fall crops longer and have them available for ourselves and others all the way till Spring.  Since the house we have has a basement room that sort of looks like a bomb shelter, but also could very well be a cold storage, I don’t have much building to do.  Just need to put in a door and some sort of vent.

Bill took two sessions called Weed the Soil, Not the Crop, and one on soil fertility…always room for improvement.

Oh, very exciting for us is our irrigation is up and running…or will be again when everything has thawed out in the Spring.  With lots of help from our knowledgeable friend, Jeff Gilchrist, we have a pump on the pond that will irrigate whenever we have one of our regular dry spells.  It will also make watering the hoophouse crops so-oo much easier than our past method of filling a tank on the back of the pick up and hauling the water out to the hoophouse.

IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN JOINING OUR CSA, CHECK OUT THE SHAREHOLDER HEADING IN THE TOP, RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS PAGE.  IT HAS INFO ON THE FARM AND HOW TO BECOME A SHAREHOLDER IN 2011.

I everyone.  The summer is sure flying by….kids are probably thinking about school shopping and hooking up with friends that they haven’t seen for a while.

For us, it seems we have a lot of gardening time left.  The tomatoes are FINALLY starting to change color.  I know that in the next week and beyond there will be tons and tons of tomatoes ripening.  If anyone is interested in having a bushel or a half bushel of tomatoes all at once for canning, let us know and we will have them ready for you on a Saturday or we can deliver them on any other day of the week.  You should try canning if you don’t already.  Last summer I canned approximately 2 dozen quarts of tomatoes and a dozen pint jars of tomatoes sauce.  I never had to buy any tomatoe products all year long.  A jar of tomatoes and one of sauce with spices makes a delicious spaghetti sauce for spaghetti, lasagna, fajitas, etc.  Add chili powder, paprika, and hot sauce and you have your chili base.  I spread a couple tablespoons of the plain tomatoe sauce on pizza crust, add oregano and basil and I have delicious pizza sauce.  On a couple of cold winter days, I just took a jar of canned tomatoes, made a white sauce and a bit of basil, heated it and had cream of tomatoe soup…better than Campbells, by far!!!  

This week you’ll have greens, sweet corn , tomatoes, cheery tomatoes (red and yellow), summer squash, kale (with my favorite soup recipe–kale will freeze nicely and can be used in soup on a cool day), cucumbers, leeks (Cathy Gilchrist said she made homemade pizza with fresh, sliced tomatoes and leeks and it was terrific), and whatever else we can find out there for you….!  We got the sweet corn from another organic farmer….yes, we are getting impatient, even though it is not late for sweet corn.  Our farmers’ market is now allowing people to bring produce in from further down state so there are several venders there with a few ‘early’ goods. 

It looks like we can use a worker this week to pick green beans….Thursday anytime, or Friday morning. 

The carrots a slowly gaining in size, kohlrabi is coming along too.  We hope to add spinach again but it won’t be ready until September.  Some of the produce just can’t handle the hot summer…like spinach, lettuce wants to bolt and become bitter,  and braccicas (cabbage type crops).  We do have pumpkins coming too, but not sure what size they will be in early October.  Last year they suddenly got nice and big and we had lots of them! 

Enjoy the rest of your summer!!

Just finished planting purple Kohlrabi…just about caught up on the weeding.  The last two weeks were marathon weedings between rain showers.  Thanks to Randee and Kathleen (and Kathleen’s daughter), we made progress.

This week you can expect the usual greens AND we are adding cabbages (these are called Farao- with tender, thin, crisp, peppery sweet leaves), broccoli (Blue Wind with early, small heads), and radishes (French Breakfast).  I will check on the cucumbers in the morning…not sure if they are ready yet.

Bill and I managed to get the red cabbage planted on Monday morning and put on the row cover in the afternoon.  It has rained since then and is supposed to rain again later today and tomorrow.  We hope to cover our potato beds this afternoon if the wind lets up but won’t be doing any work again until next week. 

Come on down to the farmer’s markets this weekend.  We’ll have an early bag of greens for you if you want them.  We look forward to seeing all of you!!

Row cover with cabbages underneath.

This is what we hope to do this week.  We will be planting cabbage transplants into the garden beds and then covering them with these row covers.  It involves a lot of kneeling and bending but if you are able, we will be putting the cabbages and broccoli in tomorrow (Monday) and Tuesday.  JUST GIVE US A CALL AT 845-6731 TO LET US KNOW WHEN YOU ARE COMING TO MAKE SURE THERE WILL BE WORK FOR YOU TO DO.  With a lot of rain the fields can get too wet because of the high clay content of our soil, so if we get more rain it will have to be pushed back to Wednesday.  Someone told me today we are supposed to have another hard frost tonight…the cabbages will probably do okay once they are under the row covers but if we have to wait another day that is okay too.  

We will be busy all day Thursday with three grandkids and three different Grandparent’s Day visitation times!  Then on Friday morning Bill will be picking produce in the hoophouse…spinach, buttercrunch lettuce, mixed leaf lettuce, daikon radishes and Cherrybelle radishes and bright lights chard to take to the Ludington Farmers Market on Friday afternoon.  We will be at the Manistee Farmers Market on Saturday with the same produce.  There will be baskets for you all to pick up at those markets.  

We spent the last couple weeks planting garden peas, sugarpod peas, three kinds of potatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, radishes, lettuces, etc. out into the garden beds.  Kathleen from Ludington was a big help with some of those plantings!  Jeff and Cathy from Scottville dropped by a couple of evenings and weeded the hoophouse crops and did some hoeing in the onion patch.

Spring has arrived for sure.  We have seeds started in flats and under the grow lights, some transplants are already growing in the hoophouse and also some seeds have been planted in the hoophouse.  In a couple of weeks you can expect mixed lettuce, spinach, romaine and chard.  I just planted bunching onions in the hoophouse yesterday…it was nice and warm in there  even though the wind and rain were swirling around outside! 

WE STILL HAVE ROOM FOR MORE SHAREHOLDERS!!  So come join us and enjoy the fresh, locally grown veggies all summer long!

Abby planning her carving technique on her zucchini

Early September we had the Michigan grandkids out for the annual zucchini boat carving.  These pictures show only two of the kids, the oldest and the youngest.

Muriel scooping out the inerds of her zucchini

Behind the paper sail proudly sits a live toad!

Abby looking satisfied with her progress!